Switching back and forth testing<>stable broken dependencies [baloo]

[Ganimede]

TLDR: after switching branches I can’t resolve some dependencies, as the Baloo package is in conflict with a new/changed version while also needed if I wanted to reinstall some packages like Gwenview.

Hello,

Curious as I am, I wanted to see whats coming with KDE Plasma 6 and switched to testing branch.
While this is a productive machine it is not crucial for availability, so I’m fine with setting it up anew if issues occur that i can not fix.

Nevertheless i want to learn more and figure out how to fix stuff so this is my request for some hints and guidance.

Switching to testing was fine, but as some themeing and some configuration broke, i at least wanted to switch back to stable for the future. So i just switched branches and rebuild mirrors back to stable. (no downgrading)

While rebuilding mirrors I got a couple of prompts come up requesting to confirm some dependencies changes. I would not be able to rebuild mirrors back to stable without declining some of those, while I had accepted those changes on the initial switch.

So now I have packages installed from testing with some dependencies reverted to stable while others are still set up from testing.

My system got a long list of orphan packages now a hand full of real foreign packages (as I installed some packages from AUR) and a whole bunch of foreign packages that just come from testing.

The real issue is, that some dependencies are broken.

I removed a couple of packages and reinstalled them to get things working. But I’m stuck with some.

 sudo pacman -S gwenview                                           ✔ 
[sudo] password for sgr: 
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: baloo5-5.115.0-1 and baloo-6.1.0-1 are in conflict. Remove baloo? [y/N] 

I can’t remove baloo-6.1.0-1 as a bunch of dolphin and plasma packages depend on it. What would be a good course of action here?
Would i need to either remove all packages depending on baloo? or rebuild packages myself with the new baloo version?

For the most part i used pamac or pacman to manage my packages. I did a couple of git clones and PKGBUILD in the past. But for the most part just by following tutorials with huge gaps in understanding what could be done differently.

[Mirdarthos]

Hi @Ganimede,

That error message makes me think you switched to testing, updated and switched back. Is that what happened?

Please provide the output of:

pacman-mirrors --get-branch

[Ganimede]

Yes, that is exactly what happened. Sorry if that did not come through from my original post.

sudo pacman-mirrors --get-branch                                  ✔ 
[sudo] password for sgr: 
stable

[Mirdarthos]

Partial updates are completely unsupported, which is what you created with:

@Ganimede

(no downgrading)

So you have two options:

1. Wait for Stable to catch up; or
2. downgrade everything:

   pamac upgrade --enable-downgrade
   

[Ganimede]

Thx @Mirdarthos,

I kind of figured. Waiting for stable to catch up or just reinstalling and starting anew was my plan for now, as I fear downgrading would break a bunch of the configuration again.

[Mirdarthos]

It might. It might not. Honestly?

But in my opinion, waiting can work if nothing gets installed.

[omano]

Indeed, you switched all packages to new Plasma major release, so going back by downgrading is probably not advised if there has been some local config files updates which break the old Plasma.

Also you don’t use pacman properly, if you don’t know what you’re doing, never use pacman -S, always use pacman -Syu to install a package, which will not work here as you would need to downgrade, so you would need to use the command pacman -Syuu

[Ganimede]

Thx for the advice @omano. I will check the man-pages or arch wiki to get a better understanding of the pacman commands. (lazy pamac user)

Regarding the the state of my system, it’s not a big deal to reinstall. Otherwise I would not do experiments like that.
I was mostly interested what could be done about it. But I guess it’s either downgrade all depending packages or upgrade all of them.

Can’t have a half baked cookie.

[omano]

For reference:

Pacman Overview

Pacman-mirrors